Final revision, and a chair.

I tried to give him a more convincing appearance of struggling. I rotated him and changed the pose a bit, which was difficult because I had manually added a lot of boards of wood over the mesh to cover up intersecting wood pieces, and I had to parent them all to the correct bones first. Another feature through which his struggle is read is, of course, the face; I made him look more strained than indecisive now. In addition, I added some bent nails, per request.

In other news, I just found a great use for UV mapping. The original purpose of the method is to map a three-dimensional object to a plane on which an image is stored. It can also be used to map out a two-dimensional shape which can be folded back into a 3D object using paper. Here's a chair I planned out and constructed using this process.

 

I started with the rather simple 3D model of a chair. No, it didn't have this texture at the time,
but it looks cool that way.

When I LSCM-unwrapped the mesh, I used the "conformal" option and
turned off "fill holes" to get a perfectly precise map. I tried to keep it all
one piece, including the concave hole, without overlaps. Then I did a normal bake
to get easily distinguishable faces (exporting a UV layout would export the useless
UV's as well as the actual corners and seams).

Here's the revision in Photoshop, adding tabs and designating folds and cuts.

Finally, the product, after cutting out and gluing the tabs.

Final Project, probably last blog post

My final project was to create a composite image whose lighting is predetermined by a photograph and which conveys an emotion of some sort. I took the photograph somewhere near Autzen Stadium, and I decided on guilt as my image's theme. The struggle of this wooden man to free himself from his connection with the wooden interior of the bridge is emphasized by the fact that he emerges covered in wood and nails. The fact that the wooden man is consequently bound to his past in his very composition and soul symbolizes the way one's guilt is not easy to get rid of, and people are driven through great lengths to inwardly justify their past.

EDIT: This won't be the last post, what was I thinking? I am still making things. Also, the revised version of my final project is coming up.

Week 3: Day 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x87JZxipsdE

Here's my little bouncing ball animation.

Sculpting, Lattices, and Last Day Revision

In response to the in-class critiques, I made this revised version of my sea monster image

Also, in class I sculpted this ugly fellow:

First Weeklong Project: Sea Creature

Here is the result of a week's worth of work. The modeling was pretty much done in the first day of the project and was fairly straightforward. Rigging the model was annoying because I encountered a lot of unexpected behavior, such as bones affecting far away and incorrect vertices after using the "flip vertex groups" button (nevertheless, this option saved me a great deal of work). I only noticed that the left leg was dragging the whole right side of the body with it in the last day. UV mapping was also challenging, especially with complex shapes like the head and the plates with a hole through them. The actual texturing was done in the last day using photoshop, using a combination of ambient occlusion baking and lots of photographs.
Just for comparison, here is what the model looked like on the first day, with no bones or textures:

Week 2, Day 3: Compositing

Once the camera is aligned with the angle of the camera that took the shot, anything can be added to a real-life scene using Blender. In the below image, I've added additional bike racks on the right side of the image.

More complicated setups are needed to make an image with reflective objects look convincing. Also, this scene contains corners. I had to use alpha maps to get rid of the jagged corners of these bricks.

Week 2, Day 2: Alpha and Displacement Maps

Alpha maps allow a flat plane to appear to have detail that would take ages to model by hand. A dragonfly wing, for example, contains hundreds of transparent cells, making it easier to use an image. Using arrays, dragonfly wings can make some beautiful designs:

Displacement maps are another form of detailing, but where alpha maps require very little geometry, displacement maps require millions of vertices to look convincing. The effect is a bumpiness which gives surfaces a more realistic texture.

Posing my character

Here is what I've done with my robot character, combined with what we did with Armatures in class today. I had to do a lot of fine tuning around the joints to get the solidity of his body consistent; in between, the joints must bend very locally. This work would pay off mostly in animation, since the difference in stretching isn't visible in a still image. I didn't really use the weight painting feature, as selecting individual vertices was more precise in this case.

Week 2, Day 1: Armatures

Today was spent learning about hair, armatures and rigging. Here is a man with hair climbing a platform, demonstrating both concepts.

Weekend Progress

I modeled, UV unwrapped, and began texturing a robot over the weekend. The design is based on Gunnerkrigg Court, a webcomic by Tom Sidell.

Day 4: Lathes and Arrays

Today, we explored the properties of glass and used curves to model radial shapes. One curve is repeated around the circular path to create a shape. I chose a wineglass:

The index of refraction is set to 1.5 for this material.

The array modifier can be used for some creative instancing as well, allowing for fractal-like shapes.

Day 3: More mirror modeling and UV textures

For the first half of class, I modeled a plug using reference images. Here are the results.

For the latter half, I unwrapped a banana mesh to match an image of a scanned banana peel in order to texture the banana. Here is the rendered banana.

Day 2: Symmetry and finishing the screwdriver

My screwdrivers now have a rack, and I changed the lighting to use 3-point lighting (it took a longer time to render with so many area lamps).

Next, we did a symmetry exercise. I created a frog train, started over with a computer, then attempted a bee.

First day

Here's my first render in the class... subconsciously inspired by Sintel's dragon, probably.
Below is my version of the screwdriver from following the tutorial: